That's something I learnt right when I started mrdoob.com. The aim there was just to share some experimentation and have fun, wasn't meant to be my portfolio but people started contacting me proposing interesting projects. At that point I took down my old (and boring) portfolio here and kept doing experiments over there.

So now it's time to apply that again... At this point I've no interest on doing Flash projects any more, hence I've removed all the Flash projects and experiments (files are still there, just not linked).

One of the things WebGL will bring us is Fragment Shaders. If you're familiar with Pixel Bender you know how Fragment Shaders work.

Although they usually go with Vertex Shaders, you can set it up for doing just 2D effects with it. Iq did exactly this some months ago with Shader Toy — a browser based Fragment Shader editor.

This week I started experimenting with this. First thing I needed to do was a sandbox with the basic WebGL initialisation code. With that done is just a matter of testing values and refreshing the browser. I tried to have a compile button right in the page so I wouldn't even need to refresh the browser but it was over complicating the code...

These are the tests I've done so far:

Next thing on the list is to implement render to texture so I can use the output of the fragment shader as input. That'll allow crazy feedback effects and even crazier drawing tools!

I think we're going to face a funny situation... For web developers OpenGL may be a bit intimidating — at least it was for me! For game developers it's piece of cake, but because some features have been disabled some of them feel like a step back in their careers. So it's an area where there won't be so many people for a while.

You may know that, for the last few months, I've been busy developing a library that aims to make this as painless and fun as possible. Hopefully there will be more libraries like this in the near future.

If you're a web developer I would suggest you to start tinkering with all this. I have the feeling things are going to move quite fast as soon as it lands. Won't be long until Mobile Safari — iOS and Android browser — also enables this.